A kitten’s growl would not come near the plights of your spoken voice. You are a banana moon subverting the sun. Your ear-splitting sequels have a mind of their own. Demonize your sofa. It will lend forth more peanuts between the cushions. The tiny sounds of ancient bees resound forth from the forrested coercions between […]

When any swashes they can find have been thoroughly buckled, or indeed buckles swashed, swashbucklers might hear the exclamation/order ‘splice the mainbrace!’. I’ve often wondered what a mainbrace was and how you would splice one. So I decided to find out. It turns out that nowadays the order ‘splice the mainbrace’ has nothing to do […]

In one of the books I read recently quite a few swashes were buckled, and this got me wondering what exactly was a swash and who you would go about buckling one. A swashbuckler (/ˈswɒʃˌbʌklə(r)/) is a swaggering bravo or ruffian, or a noisy braggadocio, and first appeared in writing in 1560, according to the […]

Lasair choille or ‘flame of the woods’ is the Irish name for the goldfinch (carduelis carduelis), two of which I saw on my apple tree this morning. I like to know the names of birds and other creatures in the my languages, and particularly liked the Irish version when I discovered it. The Irish word […]

Yesterday I bought myself a ukulele, something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while. I already play the guitar and mandolin, and had been thinking about trying other stringed instruments, such as the ukulele, banjo and bouzouki. A while ago I saw a poster about the Bangor Uke Club / Clwb Uke Bangor and […]

Yesterday I listened to an interesting episode of Word of Mouth, BBC Radio 4’s programme about language, which looked at academic English. They talked to staff and students in Swedish universities about how English has taken over from Swedish as the main language of higher education and research in Sweden. One researcher explained that if […]